Two Sides of the Coin
by harlequindreaming
Summary: She waits for him, anxious and desperate, the coin with its Protean Charm pressed to her palm. She waits long after she knows he will not arrive. And when he does come, it's agony. / Dramione during the war.
1. Messages

_**A/N **A one-shot inspired by the song Make This Go on Forever by Snow Patrol. (I've been doing a lot of song-inspired one-shots lately, I noticed.) I'll update my WIPs as soon as my last exam is done, I promise. I'd have updated sooner, but it turned out I had one more exam to study for than I thought. So, my deepest apologies._

_Aside from Make This Go on Forever, I recommend you listen to Hallelujah as covered by Bon Jovi, and Need You Now by Lady Antebellum._

_A double **xxxxxxxxxx **indicates a change in PoV._

**xxxxxxxxxx**

The coin was still warm in her hand as Hermione Granger ducked through the tent flap to tell Harry Potter it was her turn to keep watch.

Harry, predictably enough, had fallen asleep. His dip in the lake had drained him; his restraining her from bashing Ronald Weasley's head in more so. His glasses were crooked on the bridge of his nose. Hermione allowed a small smile to tug at her lips as she bent over to fix them.

"What-?" The momentary contact had roused Harry, whose hand had immediately gone to his – no, not _his _wand, precisely, just a spare one because she had broken his, back at Godric's Hollow. This one didn't work as well, but what other choice did they have – what choices did they have at all, even?

"It's me." Her fingers tightened around the coin in her hand, clutching it harder. Her blood and skin had already warmed the metal; the bite of its cold had long worn off. She pushed his arm away lightly. "Your watch is up."

"Oh." Harry let his wand arm drop back down to the snow, the other one coming up to rub sleep from his eyes. He yawned, mumbled something incoherent.

"Go on in. You need the sleep."

"Hermione, I really don't think-"

"I can take it from here."

"I'd tell you if he came-"

"Good night, Harry."

Hermione refrained from tapping her foot as he stood up, creakily, working out the kinks from his four-hour watch. Only when he had trudged back into the tent did she unclench her fist and open the coin to the snowy air.

She'd sent the message, the location, hours ago, four times over. She always did, every time they moved, no matter the where and why. It used to only be once, one message, back when he'd come when he said. But now the visits were briefer, more infrequent; the messages sparing. He would say yes and not appear. If their relationship had been anything normal, she might have been what they call _stood up._

She sat down, to watch and to wait. To hope, also, maybe, though she had long since learned the pain of expecting and being disappointed. To imagine, definitely – to think about where he might be, what he might be doing. To wonder if he was safe.

She was always waiting, because he was never certain. There might be a mission, a raid, though for whose side he never said. There were meetings, hunts. _I'm sorry, _he always wrote, until he'd said it so much the words didn't feel very real. More like words he'd made up, some way to make it up to her. Atonement that was foreign.

Ron's blissfully ignorant snoring and Harry's tosses and turns reminded her that she did have purpose, out here in the dead of winter. Horcrux hunting, chasing down the vague information Albus Dumbledore had left behind. The tiny hope for the wizarding world. They'd destroyed one, found a weapon against the rest. She ought to feel triumphant.

The coin began to grow cold in her hand again. She _had_ felt triumphant, briefly. Angry as well, at Ron's half-assed greeting and thinly veiled confession. Now she was back to feeling starved, and not only for real food.

She starved and waited.

It was pathetic, and she knew it. The cleverest witch of their age, reduced to a lovestruck teenager. But separation does things to a person, as does love, and both in tandem are simply cruel to the heart. The coin was her only link to him, her only way of knowing if he was alive, and if he died she would be the last to know because no one else knew where they were and he wouldn't be able to tell her himself.

Why she made herself miserable with these kinds of thoughts was unfathomable even to her.

He had said, much earlier that day, that he would try. _I will try. It isn't easy. _His exact words. It wasn't easy for him, yes, but did he think it was any easier for her? He would know if she had been caught, if she had died; she was deemed vital to a cause and to a hundred different lives. She wouldn't know, not for weeks or months, if he was gone, because he was only a pawn to one side and a reluctantly accepted ally to the other. He said he was vital to no one; she claimed he was vital to her.

The coin cooled off in her hand as she sat, watched, and waited. The hours passed. She conveniently forgot to wake Ron and sat through the dawn in stony silence, until the flap opened again and out came Harry with two cups of coffee. The sudden heat flooding through her stiff fingers from the cup was painful.

"Your watch is up," Harry commented as he blew at his coffee, steam rising in tendrils around them. The smell of the instant blend tickled Hermione's nose but she made no move to drink it. Harry's comment had cut her despite its innocence, and so she abruptly stood, almost upsetting him and his drink, and stalked into the tent to force her way into sleep. Her coffee lay on the ground, spilled and forgotten.

**xxxxxxxxxx**

The worst thing about watching and waiting was remembering. And oh, she remembered, she remembered so well.

She remembered falling in love with him, little by little, watching him take refuge in the library just like she did. Working on his Arithmancy homework, his Ancient Runes translations; she never did know why he had taken so many classes despite not being able to keep up with them. Draco was clever but not smart, and there was always that difference. It had been his father's idea, no doubt. Much of his life had been.

She could never pry much from him, but he'd always let little things slip. He'd let her glimpse past his walls. Swear words and adjectives in foreign languages – Russian, French – because there were no available words in the English language. Inadvertent book quotes. A harsh comment, unthinkingly thrown out, hastily retracted. She learned to listen for these, collect them, turn them over and around and fit them together like puzzle pieces. Slowly building the picture of him to completion.

But it was war time now, and there were still so many missing pieces.

She could remember his denial. The disavowal of emotions is a strange thing: one cannot suppress feelings, only ignore them, but even ignorance is acknowledgement in its own fashion. To deny something is to acknowledge that it _might _exist, and in him _might _had become _definite._

Though, to be fair, she had been in denial too. _I could never care for a coward, _was what she had said, staring each other down in the Room of Requirement one afternoon after Arithmancy. Just another one of their arguments, outbursts, but one he had taken more deeply to heart, because in the next Order of the Phoenix meeting at Hogwarts:

_The room fell silent at the knocks but Severus Snape, of all people, and Dumbledore seemed to know what they meant. Snape swept across the floor, looking pained but resigned, and who should be standing there when he opened the door but Draco Malfoy, hair tousled and cheeks flushed, a rather sheepish expression on his face._

"_You're late," Snape said._

"_I got lost." Hesitating to enter._

"_Welcome, Draco." Dumbledore stood, a benevolent smile on his face. All heads in the room swiveled to silently ask the headmaster – what the bloody hell was Draco Malfoy doing here?_

"_Draco?" And so it was asked, though to the subject of the question himself. And asked by none other than Hermione, who was half out of her seat, brown eyes wide._

"_You said you could never care for a coward." His expression was defiant, daring her to call his bluff – he was loathe to be here, and scared, but he would do this. "So here I am."_

_And there he was, indeed, doing the bravest thing he could think of. If it would make her care, then there he was._

She could remember her first time with him. Not her first time, no; that had regrettably been turned over to Ron, though Draco had not thought her any less for it. But it might as well have been, the way he had made her feel. It had not been awkward fumbling, hesitant stripping; far too fast and uncomfortable. His fingers had been deft, his kisses like drugs. It had been desperate, born from a need to have as much of the other as they could before they parted.

He had felt like a long string of women and she felt in herself her inexperience of just one man.

Sometimes she would wonder if he was ever unfaithful. And then she would remind herself that this wasn't like a Muggle war. This wasn't like the books.

**xxxxxxxxxx**

He came three days later, just when she was about to wake Ron in a fit of desperation, not wanting to sit outside waiting any longer.

"Hermione."

She stared at him a long while after he called her name, as if by looking she could ascertain he was real. Was he tangible, then – would he not dissipate into smoke if they touched? She wasn't dreaming, was she, dreaming while having fallen asleep on watch? He reached over, she flinched back, his hand hovered and hesitated and immediately she felt guilty. She closed their distance with her skin and her voice.

"Draco."

**xxxxxxxxxx  
xxxxxxxxxx**

Her skin was not as soft as he remembered and it scared him.

She was not as he remembered. There was a wear to her now, a wear and weariness, the kind you found in wars all over. She looked how he felt. The war was between them, still.

_Parting is such sweet sorrow, someone had once written, and Draco liked to think whoever that had been was right._

"_You'll-" Her voice surprised him and he stumbled mid-turn, the Hogwarts walls looming terrifyingly close. His hands and her words caught him. "You'll be careful, won't you?"_

_He laughed, then, bitter and humorless. "Bit late to be asking, isn't it, Granger?"_

"_I'm sorry." And not just for this. "I just – just answer me."_

"_It's not just my head on the line for this." Not quite the answer she was looking for, but enough. He made to turn again, to leave. She was struck with the sudden thought that this might be the last time they saw each other alive._

"_Draco, I-"_

"_No." His hand – his hand was on her mouth; his hand, not his lips. No lovers' parting for them. "Say it when there isn't a war between us, when there isn't a death threat hanging over my head. Say it when you can mean it."_

"You said you would come."

The venom, the blame, in her voice was unexpected; it knocked the wind out of him like a hex or a fall. The guilt inside him tripled and then some.

"I tried, I did." Only her, only she could have him pleading this way – willingly, desperately. "I'm sorry, but they needed-"

"They needed you. I know." Her voice was flat, detached. Her hair hid her expression. "They always need you." She trudged toward the woods, away from the tent. She needed some sort of shielding.

"It isn't easy-"

"But don't you think _I _need you, Draco?" Her voice was watery, wobbly. How is it that the human voice can switch emotions so easily, in the blink of an eye? "Can't you try for _me _too?"

"I do! Of course I do, you know I-"

"No I _don't _know, Draco!" She whipped around. Her hand lashed out as if to hit him, though it only swiped the empty air between them. "I don't know, because you never come! You say yes and then you don't show up. I am _trying _here, but you, you aren-"

"Don't say that!" Draco felt the anger bubble, anger at the fact that she might doubt him. "I _try, _goddamnit. I cut missions short, I make do, because I know if I finish early enough – if I get it done the sooner, I might have the time to find you. Do you have any idea how many days I've ransacked my room for that godforsaken coin so I could know where you are – and then when I do get there, you're gone?"

He scrabbled inside his button-down, which was one button off, and pulled out something on a string. The coin glinted in the rising sun. "And when I got tired of losing it, I strung it on this. I wore it and waited. Do you have any idea how I feel, waiting for this thing to burn against my chest – and how I feel when it _does? _The fear – fucking hell, Hermione, I'm fucking _terrified _and ecstatic every time it does."

"Then why don't you come?" They were long past the point of propriety, where they felt they needed to keep their voices down in case Harry or Ron or someone else heard them. What did it matter, anyway? Harry and Ron would have been eavesdropping from the moment she said his name. "If you bloody care so much, then why don't you come like you say?"

"Because I fucking can't! Do you honestly think I can just strut out of Malfoy Manor as I please? Or out of Hogwarts, under the eyes of all those pissing Death Eaters?"

"Then ask for help, that shouldn't be so hard!"

"You wouldn't know." And there was venom and blame in his voice now, too. The walls around his heart – the ones Hermione couldn't get around, back at Hogwarts – they were cracking. "You aren't there, you wouldn't know if it was hard. Because it fucking is, Hermione. You don't know what it's like to be under watch every fucking minute of your life – to have to be on your guard at all times because the minute you fucking slip up, it's a hex to your chest and a brand on everything else you care for. If I'm just late enough – if I'm not cruel or desperate at the right times – if I just say one word out of place – I could be dead by morning. Or my family. Or you."

"And you don't think I feel the same way?" Why had the snow not melted yet under the heat of this argument, where everything was finally coming out? Every worry, every doubt, every resentment poured out like blood from a wound and neither of them were trying to staunch it. "Do you honestly think I don't worry about any of that? Merlin, Draco, I wake up every morning scrabbling for that fucking coin, frantic for a sign that you're still alive. That you haven't been found out. I drive myself half-insane every time I take my watch because I wait for you and _you don't come. _Half the time I have to force myself _not _to think that I might be waiting for nothing, and you-"

"AND WHAT?" At that, Draco found he couldn't keep hold of himself and his anger any longer. "It isn't _any _goddamn fucking easier for me and you ought to fucking know it. Do you think that Apparating away from you each and every time doesn't kill me? That I don't wake up from nightmares of finding you in my living room, dead? That I don't fucking waste away at Malfoy Manor or Hogwarts, trying not to let thoughts of you get in the way of my playing your precious fucking double agent?"

"You _chose _to play both sides, Draco, so don't bring that up. If you just defected-"

He gave a short, derisive laugh. "I bloody well did not and will not. Dumbledore or Voldemort, it's all the fucking same to me; they're both just old men with fucked-up perspectives on life. I'm a plaything to one and a distrusted renegade to the other." He spat the words out; they peppered her like snow and bullets. "I don't have a side in this war, Hermione. I just have _you._"

Here they came, now, the walls, tumbling down around his heart. Samson had toppled Dagon's columns, Joshua had shouted down Jericho. Troy was burning. To hear those words spoken with such venom was paradoxical. To be both their cause and receiver, doubly so. Hermione stood in the lightly falling snow and the shadows and stared at Draco, and tried to find her voice among the ruins.

"What-?" The sound came out more breath than word.

"I love you." Troy was razed to the ground. "I'm not sorry – but I love you. I fight – for you. For a future with you. For a future wherein I might be able to ask you to – to marry me, and no one will be thought any the less for it. You are the one reason I try this hard." He laughed again, cold and humorless. "And you think I don't care as much."

"Draco, I-"

"No." He cut across her smoothly, already building his walls back up. "I don't want it from you just because you think I might die."

"I don't-"

Again he was leaving, again he was cutting her speech, but this time – this time thankfully, blissfully, with his mouth. The kiss was short, harsh, bruising and all too welcome. "Tell me when we've won," he murmured against her lips.

Hermione was always stubborn when she meant to be, though, and this time was one of them. "Draco, I love-"

_CRACK_

"-you."

The snow fell around Hermione with the morning light, the echoes of his Disapparation fading through the trees, and while her setting was beautiful her heart was chaos.

Why couldn't he just let her love him like they wanted?

**xxxxxxxxxx  
xxxxxxxxxx**

This time, no matter how many messages she sent, there were no replies. Or if there were, they were sparing. _I can't. _Or, _not today. _There were never any excuses now, either, nor apologies. If the words were spoken his tone might have been apologetic, but metal cannot convey sympathy and regret.

Some days she hated the coin, some days she loved it, and some days she wondered why she even bothered.

Today, however, she wished she had enough magical knowledge to transform the stupid bit of scratched-up metal into a Portkey. The sudden flare of heat in her palm had woken her up, and the words had her alert in an instant.

_I love you._

That was all. Three words, and nothing to follow them up. Hermione waited, agonized, pressed the coin into her palm so hard she thought it might become a part of her, and welcome. That way if a message were sent it would be burned into her directly. _She, _at least, could convey emotions metal couldn't.

Finally, when her soul could no longer bear the waiting, she sent the reply. _And I, you. _Old-fashioned, lacking the necessary verb, but it felt right. She could think of no other thing to say, except maybe _come back safe, _but that would be futile. He hadn't come back in weeks.

They had moved, planned, the three of them. Harry, Ron and Hermione. They were in Grimmauld Place now, Harry's home, in search of the locket. She was scared to give him the location, though; who knew who was watching the house at night.

Still, she pointed her wand at the coin, felt it grow hot in her hand. The letters rearranged themselves, telling him. _Come back to me, _she was saying. _Let me know you are alive._

She kept the coin in her breast pocket all evening, waiting. Ron's feigned clumsiness on the piano and his hopeful look only served to irritate her, and Harry's musings set her on edge. Sometimes her mind tricked her into thinking her pocket had grown warm and she nearly ripped her jacket apart getting that damned thing out to check.

She overheard Ron mentioning to Harry that they might drug her or hex her, just so she could sleep.

**xxxxxxxxxx**

The next time she saw him was not of his own volition, nor hers.

The Battle of Hogwarts, as it would come to be known, was long and fierce. Hermione had thought nothing would cut her more deeply than the sight of Harry, limp and pale and scarred, at the feet of Lord Voldemort. Her best friend – the boy she had willingly followed no matter the cost, ever since they had both been 11 – dead? No – "NO!"

She had been wrong, though. There were things that could cut much, much deeper than thinking the Boy Who Lived was dead.

"Come, Draco."

_No Draco, don't._

The boy in question, standing on the steps, determinedly not looking at her.

_Please, Draco, don't._

The way his mother was looking at her – as if to tell her something, but she couldn't read Narcissa, just like she couldn't read her son.

_Draco, no!_

Narcissa Malfoy's arm had moved. The words welled up in Hermione's throat but she couldn't get them out. She couldn't even open her mouth, get her lips to form his name. She was frozen. She could do nothing.

Narcissa was still looking at her.

Draco stepped down from the steps.

_No._

He moved closer to his family – moved further away from her.

_You said you loved me._

He did not look back.

_You said you wanted to marry me, when this was all over, didn't you?_

She could catch him if she ran, right now.

_Because I was it, for you._

But she couldn't run, couldn't move, couldn't do anything except feel her wildly beating heart.

_Draco._

Lord Voldemort held up his arms.

_I love you, you'd said._

Draco stepped toward him.

_And I, you._

With a sweeping bow, Voldemort stepped aside to reveal a manic, ecstatic Bellatrix Lestrange, wand aloft and mad eyes gleaming.

Draco stepped back.

Narcissa's arm came up a heartbeat too late.

The green flashed and Hermione's scream finally tore from her throat, the name wrenched from her lips.

"DRACO!"

**xxxxxxxxxx**

_**A/N **I am evil. I will end this here. Hehe. Chapter two to follow tomorrow, since right now I need to go to bed. I hope this was something good? It took me a few days to get the whole thing out, and I'm not completely satisfied. But the best way to know if something is acceptable is to put it up for criticism, and so here it is._

_Not entirely sure if the timeline in that last part – the "dead" Harry/"Come, Draco" bit – was correct. I can't really remember how it happens. Apologies if I'm wrong. The Narcissa bit with Hermione was all me, though._

_Read and review, please?_


	2. The Measure of Love

_**A/N **Short epilogue. I was originally going to use these scenes in a chapter fic but then I realized I didn't know how to insert them. So I turned it into a free-standing fic instead._

_Sorry for not updating yesterday like I said I would; the internet fritzed and didn't come back in time._

_Chapter time!_

**xxxxxxxxxx**

_Why is the measure of love, loss?_

Hermione had only ever skimmed that book once, on a whim, back at home. She'd found it in the bookshelf; a secondhand copy, the previous owner's name not completely cut out. She'd meant to finish it but the war had snuck up on her, and then she had no time for reading at all. But still, the first line of the book had stuck to her, and now she found it was all she could think about. But it suited her, anyway, so it was all right.

_Why is the measure of love, loss?_

Why indeed? Why is it that we only realize the significance of something once we have truly and utterly lost it? Why do we love all the more strongly when we have felt the pain of losing love, or when we _think_ we might be losing it? Why do humans think of love in terms of heartbreak, of fights and recovery, of shedding piece after piece of the heart like the petals of the flowers we so eagerly pluck off? _She loves me, she loves me not. _Even then, love is measured by loss.

_I love you, _he had said. Thrice – only thrice in their brief and bittersweet relationship. Twice in the snow and the heat of the argument, and once through cold, unfeeling metal. Still, he had been able to love her, when he had not let her love him back.

_Tell me when there isn't a war between us._

She had hated it, his telling her that. Why had he been allowed to love her? Why had _his _love been legitimate – genuine despite the war? What had she done, said, thought, to make him think that she might only love him because he might die?

_Why is the measure of love, loss?_

The aftermath of the war was ashy and exhausting and very, very gray. There was gray everywhere: ashen faces, charred walls, melted suits of armor. If people thought war taught you to see in black and white – good and evil – they were quite wrong. War was only ever in shades of gray.

The tombstone was gray.

His eyes had been gray, too.

Funny how the minute someone's heart stops beating, you begin to think of them in past tense. _He was a good man, _they might say. Or, _he was all right in the end. _Was he any less good because he was dead? Did he not affect people anymore?

_His eyes had been gray. _She, too, had fallen into the void of the past tense. He was; he had been. But always, always, her love was in present. _I love him. _Because love, real love, the love measured by loss, does not end with death.

"I love you."

She could say it now; there was no longer a war between them. There was no longer a death threat hanging over his head. They had won.

But she had lost.

_Why is the measure of love, loss?_

Was this, then, the measure of her love? That she still loved in present tense despite the loss?

Her hand came up, thin and shaking, to brush against the grayness of the tombstone. Gray like everything else in the aftermath of war. Dark, dark gray.

"I love you."

He had looked at her. In the final moments of his life – when he had backed away – his head had turned: his eyes had sought her out in the crowd. Had he, too, measured his love by his loss – by the fact that he was losing her?

"I love you."

_And I, you. _Such quaintness, but it suited her now, the sweetheart of a soldier fallen in war.

Even the coin was gray.

In the nights leading up to the funeral she had sometimes woken up, thinking the coin had burned against her skin. Some nights she deluded herself into forgetting and she would send a message via the coin. _I love you. _Or, _come soon. _Once it had simply been, _I miss you, _and she had sat through the dawn waiting for a reply. Refusing to let herself admit one would never come.

The other coin had left a slight burn mark on her bedside table.

The coin was just another shade of gray, like the one of his grave.

What once had been her sole link to him was now only a reminder of her loss. She kept the coins to remember but to remember hurt.

"I love you."

**xxxxxxxxxx**

Many years later, when Hermione Granger was laid in her grave, people would wonder why Harry Potter's final gift to his best friend was to lay two coins on her eyes. The coins were scratched and old, and the metal was cold to touch. The gesture was very Greek in nature, and it made absolutely no sense.

But Harry knew – as did Ron, and Blaise, even – that the gesture was a commemoration of the afternoon when Troy had burned, right by their tent; a memoriam to a love measured by loss. There was distance between them, now, but no longer a war.

The two sides of the coin facing Harry both read, _I love you._


End file.
